You can build and package your project in several ways in IntelliJ IDEA. In this chapter, we will focus on building a project using external tools like Maven and Gradle. Maven is the industry standard to build Java projects nowadays, so we will focus our attention on it and discuss how IntelliJ IDEA makes your work with Maven more simple and intuitive. The Maven build file is a first-class citizen in IntelliJ IDEA. The best thing is that if you use Maven or Gradle to build your application in IntelliJ IDEA, you will be able to build the project outside of the IDE as well. If you are new to Maven, check out their website at http://maven.apache.org, and for Gradle, take a look at http://www.gradle.org.
We will cover the following topics in this chapter:
Editing Maven settings
The Maven tool window
Executing Maven goals and plugins
Editing Gradle settings
Executing Gradle tasks
We already mentioned how to import the Maven project and manage its dependencies in Chapter...